Short Story - Carter versus the stupid robot goblin from outer space.
A delirious meta something or other.
It’s me, so you can consider this post NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
Why? Profanity, blood, jokes, goblin-violence, cupboards with nipples.
The usual.
Carter versus the stupid robot goblin from outer space.
It was a cold January morning when the goblin man entered my house. He didn’t use the door because his hands had too many fingers and the grease and blood and saliva on them made them slippy anyway. He licked some of the blood off as he clipped through my front wall, his face changing a dozen times as he plucked the carrot-goblin-bomb from the handbag-satchel-tote and threw it under-over-hand at me. The goblin itself was relatively stable, save for a flourescent flickering of its skin and altering pointedness in the beast’s ears. It seemed not to be able to decide which type of goblin it was. At once it was elf, reptile, shaved mammal, tall and short. But all the time it remained a goblin.
The little bastard laughed as he dry-humped the leg of the table which held my typewriter. My beloved new manuscript, Who Spilled The Humans?, was clearly in danger. I tried to keep typing, because to acknowledge the goblin man and his bag of idiot cretins is to give him a legitimacy he does not deserve, but it was not working. The goblin had by now humped itself into a forward-flip, and found itself atop my typewriter. It kicked the whiskey off the table, started reading the page as it emerged from the mechanism.
“Make her more sexy, five boobs!” the goblin cried hysterically. The goblin dealer shimmied around my house in the background. I turned briefly, seeing that he was touching up my kitchen cupboards, which had now developed nipples and mouths and eyes and teeth and tendrils. Somehow, I recognised the blood on his hands as the blood of a poet I once met, back in 1932. He had died before the goblin men got their chokehold on the literary world, one of the last people to live inside reality. I could see his soul leaking from the blood smeared on my living cupboards now, a pink hologram of his face weeping again and again.
A fierce sound came from my typewriter, and I returned my attention to it. There I saw the goblin.
“What are you doing?” I asked the pink-green-orange bastard.
“Your dialogue needs more work,” the goblin said, flicking its brass goggles. He had now added in a backstory about my protagonist skipping through a field before encountering a burning village; her village. It was cliche, sure, but it wasn’t terrible.
“And now she falls in love with boy with bright eyes, and her heart is beating,” the goblin said. He continued to type out the fact that my protagonist had a working cardiovascular system three more times, turning what should have been one or two sentences into an entire page of drivel. It was derivative too, and where did the swords come from?
“I spent five years on this!” I cried, reaching for the goblin.
“Careful Mister Carter,” the goblin dealer said. “Remember the rules, remember the… conssssssequences.”
The slippery fuckwit was right. Physical touch with a goblin or its handler was almost always deadly, and when it wasn’t deadly it launched you into frothing psychosis. They were from another reality, an eldritch horror that passed on through the skin. They were like poisonous frogs, except their poison was psychological. They could make a man believe he was a vase, and he would become a vase, and when he flexed his legs to flee he would shatter, his organs spilling to the ground, becoming sausages as they fell, becoming hands as they slapped against the ground, which became a drum, which became the taut skin of some vast decaying whale. I saw it happen once, to that poet friend I mentioned. He made the last stand against the goblin men, his face printed onto every newspaper for weeks after his ridiculous nonsensical death.
My goblin was still very much active. The characters in my manuscript were now singing sickly-sweet poems about their feelings, during a battle with dragons who were not present before, and cooking a meal which was described in such furious, speedy detail that the keys of my typewriter were beginning to become hot under the constant typing.
“Where did they get the ingredients?” I asked. “They were sailing at sea.”
“Big chef fish,” the goblin said. Whilst I could not argue with the novelty of it, it just did not make sense for my book. No. I could not take this any more. The goblin dealer was behind me now, inspecting the carpet and making a mess of my bookshelves. He was flicking to random pages and eating them. This was too far. I knew the dangers of enraging the goblin man, of even touching him, but I did not want to be at his mercy any more.
I reached for the goblin, which recoiled in fear.
“Poison,” it said. For we humans are poison to them, too. Injecting sense into its nonsense world would kill it, would give it direction, and all directions eventually end in a cemetery. It is the way of the world, of nature herself.
I didn’t care. I grabbed the goblin by its bastard leg and stood up from my chair, knocking it to the ground. Before the goblin man could react, I had swung his devil creature into the side of his head, knocking loose his teeth even as the goblin defensively turned into a pillow. It could not turn fast enough, it was still mostly goblin when I hit him. Mainly the top half. It had essentially made itself into a nunchuck by making its legs all soft and fluffy.
The goblin dealer fell to the ground, and I was drooling with rage.
I struck him again.
And again.
By now the goblin had turned into jelly and splattered against his broken face. The face shifted to my old friend’s and laughed at me.
“Bastard,” I spat. I grabbed one of the hardbacks he had discarded and stuffed the spine in his mouth. He shifted his mouth to become wider, but it didn’t matter. I had more books. Two, three, four, five. I kept forcing books in until the whole goblin handler’s body became one huge, vicious mouth. The goblin reconstituted itself now, slithering back together, picking up its copper-coloured goggles and charging at me with a kitchen knife.
I swatted the little beast with a copy of Dawkin’s The God Delusion. Then once again for good measure. The little beast slashed my arm, but this only strengthened my rage. Its master unhinged his jaw once more, and I pushed the goblin in, alongside the book, pushing on its forehead. As it slipped inward, the goggles popped off, and I held them for a moment.
By now my entire floor was mostly mouth, and I had to leave, taking my typewriter before it fell in. A black void waited behind those hideous teeth that comprised my floor, melding with the floorboards. I ran, and as I ran the walls started to crumble around me.
I sat outside on the cobbles as the house swallowed itself, turned inside out, and vanished in a poof of smoke and rubble. I found myself thumbing the etched logo on the goblin’s goggles, wondering at what point the typewriter company thought it was a good idea to invent goblins. Since their release, they’ve been nothing but trouble.
Some months later, once I had relocated, a close friend sent me a letter informing me that a house almost identical to mine had been built in the place mine once stood, and that an almost identical Mister Carter stood waiting in its doorway, a doorway which led not to the old hallway and the stairwell with the little lamp, but to a swirling, confusing mass of gears and teeth and viscera. His letter stated he only saw it once, and that next time the door was open, there seemed to be an approximation of a normal hallway behind it.
I have not been back to that town since.
And though the world now seems to be adapting to the existence of goblins, I find myself encountering them less than I had expected. I am of the belief that they know what transpired that evening, and that they are avoiding me.
End
If you’re a paid subscriber, I’ll talk to you about the backstory in a future post!
I leave you with this.
I found out David Lynch died today.
I have no words to describe how I feel about him leaving this Earth, but I think I know a song or two.
Twinkle, twinkle, Uncle Floyd.
Thanks for sharing